A Little Background on Basra, by Kate Grossman

I am embedding here some links for a brief bibliography on the archaeological and geological remains around Basrah. But I also wanted to give you a little background on Basrah (the region and the city). There aren’t a lot of really general sources on the archaeology of this province specifically, so a little backstory might be helpful.

Basrah (the city) is the capital of the Basrah province, the southern-most region of Iraq, sandwiched between Iran and Kuwait, with a small sliver of land jutting south from Basra City to the Arabian-Persian Gulf. The city of Basrah was founded in the 600s AD by the Caliph Umar, soon after the initial expansion of the early Muslim armies out of Arabia. Today, there are lovely historic constructions in the city center, any of which date from later, Ottoman times. Little remains of the earliest foundations of the city, which was, at its beginning, an Arab military encampment that eventually grew into a urban center.

Painted with a broad brush, the southern part of Iraq has been called the “Heartland of Cities” by archaeologists, because the world’s first cities, states, and literate civilizations developed in that region around 3500 BC. However, much of Basrah province itself might have been underwater during this early period of cultural florescence. Not only did the Arabian-Persian Gulf coast line perhaps reach much further north into Iraq in antiquity, but marshes also covered much of the area. There are (or more accurately, were) several main areas of marshland in southern Iraq, with the al-Hammar marsh in particular located mostly in the Basrah province. Today, there is some evidence that we should be looking for the origins of cities not along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers further north in the Dhi-Qar Province, but on the “turtleback” mounds of the Basrah province marshes. Early art works from southern Mesopotamia during the period of urbanization and state formation (4th and 3rd millennia BC) are covered in iconography that has more to do with marshes than river valleys, for example. However, such models remain to be tested, and the role of marsh sites in the Basrah region specifically, as opposed to the more well-studied settlements in Dhi-Qar to the north, is still an outstanding question.

By the early second millennium BC, the Basrah region may also have been home to the enigmatic “Sealand Dynasty,” a group of rulers of who held the southern reaches of what is today Iraq for over three hundred years (c. 1740-1475 BC). The Sealand Dynasty is attested in a few cuneiform historical sources (mainly king lists), but is otherwise poorly understood. From the sources, the dynasty seems to have ruled the marshes (hence the name) near where the Tigris and Euphrates entered the Gulf. The Sealand rulers were occasionally able to take control, for brief periods of time, of cities further north on the southern Mesopotamian plain.

Compared to the large scale excavations and survey in the Dhi-Qar province just to the north, there has been surprisingly little archaeological excavation within Basrah province itself. The marshes prevented much exploration in the early and mid twentieth century, while the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars prevented further work in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Today, the marshes are being re-established, a boon for the environment, but perhaps a loss for archaeological research. Still, a variety of research projects undertaken by Carrie Hritz (AAAS) and Jennifer Pournelle (Univ of South Carolina) in recent years have attempted to address this paucity of data.

So, with all that in mind, here are some readings on some of these issues. Sorry if some of these are too jargonistic – the pickings are surprisingly slim when hunting for good sources on the archaeological remains in Basrah province.
This article by Carrie Hritz and Jennifer Pournelle talks about a survey of archaeological and geological features of the area. It’s a little heavy to read through, but it is some of the best work being done at the moment:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i5uj5j60x4w6fz4/IRAQ_74_CH02_Hritz_et_al.pdf?dl=0
For more information on the archaeology of southern Mesopotamia (southern Iraq) in general, this chapter by Harvard archaeologist Jason Ur is a good starting point:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ubenmtpbzqx7glw/Ur2012.pdf?dl=0
I don’t have a PDF of this nice overview of the history of Basrah, unfortunately, but I’ll try to find one in the coming days – it’s also available on GoogleBooks, if you feel comfortable hunting for it that way.
“Basrah” in Cities of the Middle East and North Africa :a historical encyclopedia. Michael R.T. Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley (eds.), Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007.
And here are some reference on the marshes themselves:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/world/middleeast/restoring-iraqs-garden-of-eden.html
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/13/restoring-iraqs-lostmarshes.html
http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1641/0006-3568%282006%2956%5B477%3ARTGOEA%5D2.0.CO%3B2
Happy Reading!
Kate
—
Dr. Kathryn Grossman
Lecturer in Archaeology
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 8-436, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 324-6148

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3 thoughts on “A Little Background on Basra, by Kate Grossman”

Kate and I met recently and spoke about her interest in bringing the BasraBoston project into her classes at MIT. She hopes to connect her students with Adil and his students at the University of Basra. I look forward to connecting with both of them after classes begin.

I would like to ( update) the historical information about Basra ancient history :
the most ancient city in modern Basra is ( Alexandria on Tigiris) 332 B.C. , then Porat city ( Seleucid period) and Apulum(Apologos) city in mouth of Euphrates in the Gulf .
The sea shore of the Gulf during ( 4th century B.C.) was much more to the north than what it is today , the Euphrates was discharging by his own separate mouth close to the village of Diritodis ,( Teredon), about 20 km north of Ikaros (Failaka) , the rivers of Southern Mesopotamia were all flowing into the Chaldean lakes( Marshes today, north of Basra) and from there by their separate mouths to the Gulf .
The Tigris and the combined water flow of Eulaios/Choaspes/Karun/Karkecbcch called Eulaios /Pasitigris were flowing into the lakes and( Shatt Al-Arab today) and from there to the Gulf .The lakes were separated from the sea by a strip of marshy and swampy mud-waters
Later on during the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. the Euphrates joined the Tigris at the Shatt al- Arab and both discharged in a combined stream into the sea.
The Chaldean lakes at some stage they dried out
During that period there may not have been a distinguishable shore line which was gradually extended to today’s boundaries after being in constant flux from tidal effects and over flooding.